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Reading in the Attic

I haven’t yet watched Lifetime’s new adaptation of the V. C. Andrews novel “Flowers in the Attic,” that gothic literary sensation of my youth, with its notorious, scary cut-out paperback cover and brother-sister incest plot. But I did re-read the book recently, because a friend of mine was throwing a “Flowers in the Attic”-themed fundraising event. (I have strange friends.) I was stunned to discover one theme I had forgotten: this isn’t really a book about incest after all, or even bad moms. It’s the written analogue of an after-school special about the dangers of reading.

Given what a prim snob I was as a pre-teen reader, it’s amazing that I picked up any of Andrews’s books in the first place. I’d skipped Judy Blume’s “Forever,” for instance, on the basis that all the jokes about Ralph were tacky. But, while I vividly recall flipping through “Flowers in the Attic” with a flashlight, late at night, the experience appears to have been traumatic, since I retained no memory of the book’s contents other than donuts powdered with arsenic. I didn’t remember that there were two younger twin siblings, for instance, or the tar in the hair, or the whippings, or even that the rotten mother had trapped her kids in the attic until she could convince her rich father to re-inherit her. But what I really didn’t remember was how little happens in “Flowers in the Attic.” Once the kids are trapped up there, all they do is read. Viewed from one perspective, it’s a tragic story of a years-long experiment with homeschooling gone horribly awry.

Not that the Dollanganger kids mind, exactly. When they’re first locked in the attic, Christopher, the hot blond brother, sees it as a clear opportunity given what avid readers they are. Honestly, he’s suspiciously upbeat on the subject. He even makes a stirring speech to his siblings about how they now have “time to spare, hours to fill, a million books to read, time to let our imaginations take wing.”

So that’s what they do. The older siblings read “Peter Rabbit” to the twins. Christopher reads “Tom Sawyer.” Cathy, the older sister, reads “Jude the Obscure” and “Wuthering Heights” and “Lorna Doone” and “King Arthur,” after which “a door opened I hadn’t known existed before: a beautiful world when knighthood was in flower.” She gets hooked on Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neill, and “anything that was dramatic, fanciful and fraught with tempestuous emotions.” Christopher is more a fan of Sherlock Holmes and medical manuals. At one point, the two get into a debate about whether it’s better to read books to “improve” or to “entertain” themselves, which is when the book begins to seem suspiciously neurotic about its own lurid ways.

Naturally, the first thing the kids do is memorize the Bible, because their fundamentalist grandmother has a rule that all four kids have to read it or, if they can’t read, soak it up by osmosis. The older siblings are entirely onboard for this. As Christopher points out, defiantly, “It’s bloodier and lustier than any movie we ever saw, and talks more about sin than any book we ever read.” As the Dollangangers near puberty, they run out of reading material, and so their crazy, evil mother starts throwing books at them without scanning to see whether they are “suitable reading for young minds so easily impressed.” Their favorite book during this period is an outrageous historical novel that features graphic scenes of childbirth and material about naked kings and queens holding court in their bedrooms. This causes Cathy and Christopher to have flirtatious conversations about nakedness during medieval times.

Finally, we arrive at the climax—the Gothic love crime the reader has been waiting for, the outcome of years of sadomasochistic suffering and independent reading. Cathy and Christopher lie side by side, mutually reading a Victorian book about star-crossed lovers named Lily and Raymond. The lovers had to “overcome monumental obstacles to find and stand upon the magic place of purple grass,” then, tragically, they kill themselves before they realize they’re already on the grass. Twist! This plot turn freaks Cathy out. A lifelong drama queen, she slams the book shut and throws it against the wall. The two begin a debate about the story’s symbolism, during which Christopher sneers, “I’ll bet you a hundred to one a woman wrote that junky romantic trash.” Cathy immediately defends the book, arguing that the author—whose name is T. M. Ellis—might actually have been a man, and that, anyway, if she were a woman, she was probably forced to use those initials because of sexism, and, also, “Why is it all men think everything a woman writes is trivial or trash—or just plain silly drivel? Don’t men have romantic notions?” she asks.

Not to push the point, but this conversation takes place inside a trashy romantic novel written by a woman who uses the pen name V. C. Andrews. It’s also one of those highly repressive (not to mention passive-aggressive) arguments that literature grad students tend to fall into late at night in lieu of having actual sex. Somehow, it leads to Cathy giving Christopher a Prince Valiant haircut. The beautiful siblings begin to wrestle and he accidentally stabs her with the scissors. He heals this wound in sexy ways. As he does, she gazes into “the shifting, kaleidoscopic, rainbowed colors of his tortured eyes.” Things take a definitive turn, and they land on the magic place of purple grass, erotically speaking. When Christopher kisses Cathy’s nipple, she says, “I can picture Raymond kissing Lily, just where you kissed.” When he laughs, she describes his laugh as “one of those dry chuckles you read about in novels.”

Books! As a TV critic, by the way, I feel obliged to pause and admit that my medium is not entirely off the hook. Fairly late in the novel, when the Dollangangers are teen-agers, they do get a small television. It makes them physically vain, extremely worried about acne, and convinced that they are at the right age to start dating. It’s pretty clear, though, that the books carry most of the blame.

Anyway, at this point Christopher and Cathy are primed to “do it,” because they’ve read every possible book, plus watched a few zit-cream ads. Luckily, just in time, they sneak into their mother’s room and find some graphic pornography disguised inside a book called “How to Create Your Own Needlework Designs.” Christopher ravishes Cathy against her will, because he can’t control his lust and jealousy. However, she reassures him that it’s not really rape, and that, actually, she could have held him off if she had wanted. She accepts that his unstoppable passion is inevitable, given puberty, the attic, her blond beauty, and all the reading.

To my knowledge, I haven’t read any other books by Andrews—although who knows, since I clearly have a lousy memory. I doubt that they contain this much description of reading, since they are not set in attics. But there is one other major element of “Flowers in the Attic” that concerns books, and that is the introduction, which is written by Cathy herself and explains that this is her memoir. She knows that she’s no Dickens; in fact, she laments the fact that “Flowers in the Attic” is not more like “David Copperfield.” Unfortunately, she explains, Dickens “was a genius born to write without difficulty,” while Cathy writes “with tears, with bitter blood, with sour gall, well mixed and blended with shame and guilt.” Then she shows that she’s learned a lot about literature and the motivations of authors. The final lines of the introduction are among the most memorable: “Certainly God in his infinite mercy will see that some understanding publisher will put my words in a book and help grind the knife that I hope to wield.”

It’s difficult to come to any major conclusions about what Andrews is trying to say with all this—whether she’s apologizing for her book, advocating for its macabre power, parodying the notion of books as youthful corruption, or just getting off on the idea of the Dollanganger siblings as the world’s most suggestible reading club. But there’s at least one implicit theme, and it’s one Cathy herself would surely support: whatever nasty, amazing qualities a lace-covered paperback has, it’s got nothing on the Bible.